This Is Not an Apology

The president is in Laos, which is one of the first obscure foreign nations that penetrated the fog of childhood from newscasts half-heard while I was eating dinner with my parents. One of the fragments that fascinated me was some place called the Plain of Jars.

They were always fighting on the Plain of Jars. What I did not know until much later is that, between 1964 and 1973, while most of the country's attention was drawn to the war we were making on Vietnam, the U.S. Air Force dropped more ordnance on Laos than it dropped in all of World War II, and the Plain of Jars was one of the principal targets. This included 262 million cluster bombs, which are anti-personnel weapons that do not discriminate as to which personnel they are anti-, or as to whether they exploded in 1965 or last Tuesday. An estimated 100 Laotians die from unexploded ordnance ever year, many of them killed by weapons launched before they were born. The landscape of Laos is a fully functioning Doomsday Weapon.

This also resulted in something of a drop-off in tourism to the Plain Of Jars, which is so remote that it never did much business in that regard anyway. But the UN, along with historic preservation groups from around the world have worked tirelessly to help clear the area of these zombie explosives; the Plain of Jars was declared an UNESCO major cultural heritage site.

On Tuesday, the president announced an initiative that would help this effort go on. And, according to The New York Times, he did something else, too.

Mr. Obama, the first sitting American president to visit Laos, recalled that the United States had dropped more than two million tons of bombs on this country during the height of the Vietnam War, more than it dropped on Germany and Japan during World War II. That made Laos, per capita, the most heavily bombed country in human history. "Villages and entire valleys were obliterated," Mr. Obama said. "Countless civilians were killed. That conflict was another reminder that, whatever the cause, whatever our intentions, war inflicts a wrenching toll, especially on innocent men, women and children." At the time, the United States did not publicly acknowledge its combat operations in Laos, a C.I.A.-directed expansion of the war against the Communist North Vietnamese. Even now, the president said, many Americans were unaware of their country's deadly legacy here. "It is important that we remember today," Mr. Obama told an audience of 1,075, including a scattering of Buddhist monks in saffron robes. Those gathered listened politely and applauded occasionally.

The president did not expressly apologize for what the United States did to Laos during the CIA's so-called "secret war" there. But what he said will be taken as an apology by those prone to deliberately misinterpreting his remarks. He also promised another $90 million over the next three years to help the Laotians with finding and detecting unexploded ordnance in the country.

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This is not an apology. This is an acknowledgement that this huge country made war so ferociously in that little country that we are still killing its citizens today.

If Cambodia was the sideshow to Vietnam, then Laos was the sideshow to the sideshow. The CIA recruited among the Hmong people of Laos, and they proved to be some of our most loyal allies in whatever the hell it was we were trying to do over there and, when we decided we had done enough of whatever the hell we were trying to do over there, we left the Hmong high and dry. Some of them were lucky enough to come here, and many of them had their immigration sponsored by church groups.

They found work in various meatpacking plants in Minnesota, and in Arkansas, where I once met some of them because their children had become the heart of a football dynasty at a tiny high school in the Ozarks. I sat one long, hot afternoon with one of them who had been a soldier in the cause of whatever the hell we were trying to do in Southeast Asia. His name was Thong Moua.

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NOON, TORPID and still, came hammering down on the low, dusty hills. Thong Moua stayed inside, because it was too hot to work, and he had no chickens to tend anyway. He showed a visitor his clippings. A picture of himself as a soldier, impossibly young and grim. Proclamations from the U.S. Congress and the Massachusetts state legislature in recognition of his and the Hmong's service in the Vietnam War. He talked about waiting for Tyson to bring him more chickens, so he could work again. "They said a month, six weeks, whenever it gets cool," he said. He thought things would be all right. Hope has been dearly earned in this shady little house. Moua talked about people he once knew. Some of them died in the war. Some were slaughtered when it ended. Some of them died in the deep jungle, and some drowned in the Mekong, because the Hmong were mountain people and didn't know how to swim. Some of them died in the camps. Moua survived.

If you give this president nothing else, give him this. He has looked at this country's moral balance sheet and he has tried to settle at least some of its debts, even as we accrue more of them in distant places from which not even he has been able to disentangle us.

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